forex.earninternet.com presents Forex Affiliate Conference

White, Grey, Black Hat Forex Affiliate Marketing

I discovered an interesting thread were an affiliate manager expressed concern about a presentation that was basically an affiliate bashing session.

The site was recommended to me as a great resource for affiliate marketing and for research for my presentation next week at a Forex Affiliate Conference. Here is the post I made in response to that thread.

It’s unfortunate that such a presentation to place. First I can understand the problem and issues that affiliates, and affiliate managers have. The simple fact of the matter is that ever since marketing took off on the Internet in about 1994 there has been white hat, gray hat, and black hat marketing tactics. Affiliate marketing very quickly became the lead form of marketing on the Internet. A more balanced presentation however would have benefited all as opposed to just slamming affiliate marketing in general. What should have been pointed out is that when company has product that they are promoting, and putting out it out to an affiliate marketing program than they are in fact in competition with their affiliates. They need to understand and accept this. They have every right to cancel or terminate any account that violates their TOS or takes part in black Marketing (illegal activites as in spam, copywrite vilotation and such), however to penalize EFFECTIVE marketing makes no sense.

However if I as an affiliate am doing guerrilla marketing, as in gray hat, not violating their TOS, not doing anything illegal but basically doing more effective marketing then they are then they should be happy. Instead some resent the fact that I′m better at marketing their product then them and figure I am taking away direct sales.

So you see there are two sides to this coin. I have had companies and affiliate managers in the past try very hard to figure out what my marketing techniques were. I unfortunately had to start covering my tracks because in the past companies took my marketing efforts and implemented themselves bypassing me and sometimes passing on strategies to their other affiliates.

Ever since marketing took off on the Internet one of the biggest challenges has been dealing with fraud and black Marketing of affiliates, and affiliates having to deal with the fraud in reporting and the theft of their traffic by producers.

So the simple fact the matter is both parties to be aware of underhanded operations and protect themselves against that.

I took part in affiliate marketing back in 1995 then later developed my own product and opened it up to affiliate marketers. This resulted in huge success and I retired in 1999. I assure you one of my biggest tasks as an affiliate, then as a business owner utilizing affiliates was fraud detection.

After being away from doing business on the Internet for several years I decided earlier this year to investigate the opportunities and new ways of doing business and intend to play with it on a part-time basis. What I′ve discovered over last four or five months is that nothing has changed, yet everything has changed. That is to say the same strategies will work however the tactics are different.

I came across abestweb about a month ago however I could not post as my IP was being blocked. I think it may have been due to the fact that I live in Mexico, I′m not sure. However e-mail seems to have resolved that situation. The reason I mention this was I was told that this was a great source for the research that I needed to do in this thread provided some great insight.

I will be speaking at forexaffiliateconference.com next week in Vegas and ofter an open invitation to anyone wants to hook up.

Barry Zolten
forex.earninternet.com

UPDATE — My post has been removed and I am banned at abestweb. It seems you are not allowed to put URLs in your posts. Now talk about retarded. Well I will not be putting any input there, will just USE any info posted there.

Ultimate Dirty Internet Marketing Tricks is an interesting FREE e-book I just discovered. It seems that EthicCash gives away quite a bit of free stuff, in fact some of it is PLR. If you click on the link you′ll find that there are five free e-books and you can sign up for free membership and gain access to other free stuff. Actually I was very impressed with the amount of free information the site provides. Also check out In-Your-Face Internet Marketing Words of Wisdom.

Here’s an example of what you’ll find at his site.

Worried about the next Google slap? Do you only rely on Search Engine traffic? Don’t know where to start when you need to drive traffic to your site? If yes, this article is for YOU! Whatever you do on the net, you will always deal with Traffic Generation…the holly grail.

To make it short, you have 2 main types of traffic :

1) Search Engine traffic
What is it? : organic traffic coming from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN

Pros :
- This traffic is f.re.e
- Traffic is highly targeted
- Volume of traffic can be very high

Cons :
- you don’t control it
- you rely on robots to analyze your site and deliver
some traffic
- you need to get indexed…without being de-indexed
(once again, you rely on search engines policy and algorithms)
- short term

2) Referred Traffic
(I know Search engine traffic is also a sort of referred traffic, but let’s put SE traffic apart
from this category)

What is it?
Traffic coming from third party sites (other than search
engines) and is a result of a “manual / human” action.

Examples : article directories, social bookmarking services,
forums, partners, text link ads, banners, directories, rss…

Pro :
- you control it
- you have a lot of means to develop it (almost unlimited ; a lot are fr.ee)
- it’s highly targeted
- You can pay to get better targeting and control over your referred traffic
- Long term

Cons :
- Time & resources consuming
- Repetitive tasks

Now, through my membership (Niches-In-A-Box), my forum, my readings of other forums, I know that most webmasters mainly rely on search engines traffic, our first category.

The aim of the present article is to throw the light on a different angle of the Traffic Generation big box!

Summary : the right way to get into traffic generation is to forget about search engines.

Focusing on search engine traffic gives a too narrow vision of traffic generation. It does not reveal all the opportunities existing outside of the search engines (understand all the way to generate Referred Traffic).

In addition, as you’ve seen from the cons above, you accept to rely on something you never control, and this is a HUGE risk in your marketing strategy.

Warning : I do not say, you should not care about search engine traffic. I say that it should not be your priority, and the first door you try to open when dealing with traffic generation. It’s a question of point of view.

Now, on the other hand, focusing on developing what we called Referred Traffic is a more positive, constructive and profitable attitude and marketing strategy.

Not only will you build traffic for the long term, but you will also “manually” control your traffic, either by
submitting your content, your sites, your feeds, or by exchanging links, content, traffic with partners, being active on forums, blogs…

Doing it this way will give you a lot of power and effectiveness. Those sources of Referred Traffic only vanish…if you decide to let them vanish. Once again, you control everything.

Now, you have some positive side effects :
- By building Referred Traffic, you give a lot of food to search engines to index your site, understand

them, and rank them well…
- …thus developing naturally your Search Engine Traffic!

Try to develop Referred Traffic by submitting your sitemap to Google, and you will understand the difference between the 2 approaches.

Google and other search engines tend to change their algorithms quite often to produce more relevant content for users of their engines. Sometimes, your site is getting de-indexed in a day just because of this.

Are you lost, is your site dead? It could if you only relied on Search Engine traffic. It has no impact if you focused on building Referred Traffic.

In one case, you feel bad and like if you had wasted your time. In the other case, you don’t even notice it (on the long run ; of course, you can see a fall in traffic coming from a given search engine)

But even then, your site has a lot of chances of being re-indexed when you’ve build Referred Traffic, simply because the search engines food is still there! And this is a HUGE difference and one of the most valuable asset you can develop.

If you’re still with me, you should now understand my point : when dealing with bots, you need to act as a human…which means you should not try to talk to them. Give them some “bot food” that you build naturally by developing a Referred Traffic Generation Strategy.

Here are 10 easy “pieces” to do what we described above :

Once you have a site…
1) Find some related blogs, read them, identify trends, and post comments (no stupid comments, no spam of course) with a link back to your site where you’re also discussing the topic

2) Do the same with related forums. Use search engines (!) to find relevant forums. Register and start being active on these forums. Use your signature to put a link back to your site

3) Create a blog (if you don’t have one) and post on a regular basis on it. Use a service like feedburner to syndicate your content with other webmasters.

4) Submit your feeds, blogs, and site to niche directories

5) Find “authority” sites in your niche, analyze them and contact the webmasters to :
a) propose a link exchange (you should first put a link to their site),
b) if you’re selling a report or an ebook, propose them to become an affiliate (give them a fre.e copy of your ebook first), and make it easy for them to manage their promotion
c) if they have a newsletter, read it, understand it, and then ask the webmaster if you can have a sponsored ad into it, or even better a solo ad where you could advertise your site, newsletter, ebook…
d) propose content exchange with link back to each other’s website
e) build a relation with them

6) The most effective : write articles and submit them to article directories (some with big traffic, and some niche related ones)

7) Social bookmarking and social networking :
a) build a Squidoo lens (see http://squidooprofits.com for more details). You can find many sites like Squidoo and build pages about your niche on these ones too. You can link them to your main niche sites, you can link back to your blogs, or even to your other “squidoo” like pages, thus creating a

“niche social net″ all relevant to your niche.
b) build a myspace account and create a profile around your niche, then build your “list″ of friends around this profile
c) submit your site to social bookmarking services (digg, technorati, del.icio.us …)
d) You can also comment on the most popular entries with a link back to your site, blog, or squidoo lens.

8 Use videos and sites like youtube.com (and similar) to drive traffic to your niche site. Produce a short video (2-3 minutes) around your site, your niche and you. Link to your Videos from your “niche social net″ (see 7) ) Also, ask webmasters to put a link to this video (once you have build a relation with them) - Or they can upload it to their server and brand it with their affiliate ID, if you have
an affiliate program

9) Make it viral : your best source of (new) traffic…is your (current) traffic!

Use some “Tell a friend” features on your site to have them promote your site. You can provide incentives (such as a free report, a coupon for your ebook…)

10) Paid Traffic : yes…all the above technics do not cost a penny…(unless you pay for advertising on a partner’s site)

You can pay to get targeted traffic : you can advertise through text link ads, banners, that will appear on high traffic sites.

You should serioulsy consider paid traffic. Do not see it as a cost, but rather as an initial investment to boost your site. Also, if your site is correctly monetized, then paid traffic is the easiest way to get some quick metrics about this, and to make it profitable quickly.

As you see we could easily expand this list. But, those are, in my opinion, the most important sources of Referred Traffic.

Now, compare the above list with Search Engine traffic, and you will see why your approach should focus on generating Referred Traffic and not Search Engine Traffic. This type of traffic will come
naturally anyway…

I hope I made Traffic Generation a bit clearer…

To your success

JP Schoeffel

http://www.nichesinabox.com